Monta, All is Kinda Forgiven

The Warriors’ decision to relinquish their rights to void Monta Ellis‘ six-year, $66 million deal isn’t really curious as much as it is, well, weird. Having held the threat over him this long, they just sort of slipped away from it as though it were a puddle to walk around.

Ellis’ year was largely lost through his own fault, but he was not the only reason the team reverted to its old dishwater-gray ways. The word “dysfunction” would be wrong because it clearly functions as Don Nelson’s laboratory, and whatever Ellis feels about the way he was dealt with in response to his childishly reckless and non-forthcoming response is still sheathed in his own inscrutability. He’s happy as a Warrior until he isn’t, which is pretty much the way it always works.

But as much as the Warriors didn’t worry about his state of mind during the season, they probably don’t worry much about it now, either. Their apparent new plan seems to be to create a new version of themselves around the young nucleus of Anthony Randolph and Andris Biedrins, with Stephen Jackson and Ellis as fascinating but idiosyncratic sidebars.

The problem with this, of course, if not that it’s Randolph and Biedrins rather than Jackson and Ellis, or that it really matters. It’s that once again, they are trying to reinvent themselves, and the truth is that reinvention is just another word for “hamster wheel.”

Ellis might have been the heart of the “new” Warriors if not for his injury, but we’ll never know because the Warriors are nothing if not spectacularly impatient. While grinding on relentlessly about Nelson as Machiavelli, we miss the central reason why the Warriors never seem to progress — they never create a roster that they want to live with for very long.

It’s almost as if they don’t know what they want, but they know what they don’t want, which is whatever they happen to have now. It is why they’ve treaded chest-deep water for so many years, and why they end up losing the casual audience by Valentine’s Day.

Until they find better talent, and at least one potential Hall of Famer (you don’t go deep into any NBA playoff without at least one), and stay with it long enough to create not just an identity but a sense that being a Warrior is something permanent and valuable, they’ll be as they have been — a team of itinerants, building and dismantling too fast for anyone to ever know if they can ever get it truly right.